2010: A Mandelbrot Odyssey
January 17, 2012
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While the title of this post is slightly beyond my understanding… Which is mainly because I had nothing to do with creating it… I find myself, nonetheless, publishing this rather off-kilter post, which is about nothing in particular, other than for the sake of sharing a magnificently orchestrated zoom into (and out of) the Mandelbrot Set. Truth be known, the title came from a YouTube video, which I Stumbled upon only the other day. And as it was so beautifully done… Not to mention that I so enjoy Johann Strauss’ classical masterpiece, “The Blue Danube”… And with its analogy to Kubrick and Clarke’s potent cinematic magnum opus, which I also adore so… I just had to post it here for your viewing pleasure (it’s best to view it in 720p HD on a full screen with the volume cranked UP for maximum effect).
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To find out more about the maker of this video, please click here.
And to find out more about “2001: A Space Odessy”, please click here.
OR to hear an explanation of what “2001: A Space Odessy” was all about, then please click here.
And, lastly, to find out more about Alex Gray (who’s artwork I use at the top of this post), please click here.
“Out Beyond Ideas” by Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi
January 16, 2012
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Out Beyond Ideas
Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
each other
doesn’t make any sense.
by Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi
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To find out more about the author of this poem, please click here.
Animations Of Unseeable Biology
January 15, 2012
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I’ve written a little bit before on what life actually is… On how ‘we’, as human beings, are beginning to figure out how life, as we know it, arose from a sea of seemingly non-living molecules… And we’ve even seen how the fine line between everyday non-living bio-chemistry mimics and resembles – with amazing analogy – the living systems that we call ecosystems… That we call our “selves”. I’ve even shown – with the help of a lecture given by Dr Bruce Lipton – how the complex interaction of molecules (all of which are made up from the numerous atomic elements, which are really nothing more than star dust) gives rise an orchestration of consciousness that allows all of us i.e. each and every type of living organism alive here on Earth today, to perceive the world around us, in some manner or another… To interact with the ever changing environment that continually shifts around our bodies and beings, so that we can survive and slowly modify ourselves and our habits – through the process of Natural Selection – to its ever changing rhythms and challenges, thus ensuring our survival.
Well… If you got all of that, then your laughing and you’re well on your way to finding out what the notion of your ‘self‘ i.e. the mind/brain/body/environmental continuum, is really all about, as well as how these supposed ‘selves’ are all entangled into a long chainmail of causes and effects, a process that, ultimately, relates all of us to one another (no matter how far away everyone might seem at any given moment to our own self centred points of view), so that we come together as ‘One.’ As Kalu Rinpoche pointed out before in “Karma, Interdependence and Emptiness“, “When you hear the sound of a bell, ask yourself, ‘What makes the sound?’” And so, just as with the notion of your “self”, perhaps we should ask, “When I am conscious… What makes me conscious?” When we start to see all the details compiled into the totality of the whole picture (if we ever truly can do so in one lifetime, simply due to the sheer magnitude of parts), along with how interdependent they all are on one another, then the notion of “self” blurs into the surrounding environmental events that gave rise to everything around us, as well as us. As we are a part it all, reliant on every detail being exactly the way it was – and presently is – then perhaps we really are a part of “Nature” itself? Perhaps this is what Spinoza wrote about when he discussed the notion of “God, or Nature”?
Either way, I’d like to add one more TED Talk – to the many that have already found their way onto the many pages of this website – so as to enhance the scientific facts and findings that are slowly illuminating part of the essence of what we all really are – complex organic molecular environments that have become “self” aware… And, thus, I would like to present this talk given by the eminent biomedical animator (I know, what a kewl job title) Drew Berry, who’s scientifically accurate and aesthetically rich visualizations are elucidating cellular and molecular processes for a wide range of audiences, both in the scientific community and outside it.
But just before hand… I’d like you to ask your “self”… “Am I really a “living” being? One that is undeniably distinct and truly separate from all the other animals who reside here on planet Earth with us? Or am “I” just a complex orchestration of inter-reactive organic molecules/chemicals/’star dust’ that has evolved over time into ever increasingly complex manifestations, so as to eventually become “self” aware?”
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Drew Berry: Animations Of Unseeable Biology
We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do — Drew Berry wants to change that. At TEDxSydney he shows his scientifically accurate (and entertaining!) animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells.
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To find out where I sourced this video from, please click here.
And to find out more about Drew Berry, please click here.
OR to learn more about TED, please visit their website by clicking here.
“Only Breath” by Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi
January 14, 2012
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Only Breath
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam or Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.
by Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi
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To find out more about the author of this poem, please click here.
And to find out more about Four Seasons Productions, please click here.
Our Daily Bread
December 23, 2011
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I’ve been away for a while… And, as a result, I’ve haven’t been doing much in the way of writing. Thus, I’m not going to say too much about where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing… At least not just yet. Rather, in my first post after this extended sabbatical, I would simply like to recommend to you all a documentary… One that has affected me deeply, reminding me about certain principles that I try to uphold in my life.
Nowadays people seem to be more and more concerned with where the food on their plate comes from. And rightly so… Many of us want to know that our food is treated humanely and fairly before it arrives to the supermarkets from when many of us buy it. But, despite all the information we are given on the packaging, many of us don’t see the actual processes that bring it into existence. For once, this film allows us to peer inside the world of modern food production… A world that still operates in today’s society of free-range eggs, chickens, goats, etc… No doubt it is a sight that we rarely – if at all – see… Especially via the channels of media that give us our daily doses of news, entertainment and education. Still, it is nonetheless presently going on out of sight and out of mind. And, perhaps all the more importantly, whether you like it or not, you are probably consuming food that was prepared in one of the ways documented here.
Again, I don’t want to say too much about it… Other than, what possibly makes this movie all the more pertinent for those of us living in today’s consumerist world is the fact that it doesn’t judge. It simply shows us how some of our food is processed, doing so without any commentary… The only sounds you will hear during its entirety are part of the actual environment in which the food production is being filmed. So if you fancy a visual feast, one that is – at times – hard to digest, please take a look at this film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, entitled “Our Daily Bread.”
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If you would like to view the trailer, please click here.
Or if you’d like to find out more about the director and his other projects, please visit his website by clicking here
ALSO… The first five people to send me an E-mail – by clicking here – will receive a copy of this DVD free of charge. You’ll have to send me an address to which you can receive post from. All details will be used in the strictest of confidence i.e. they will only be used to send a copy of this DVD to… After which they will be deleted and, thus, not shared with or given to anyone else.
The Greatest…
August 26, 2011
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The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the world’s ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.
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Modern Science, If Anything, Is Leaning Towards Buddhism
August 25, 2011
I’ve recently been researching a particular topic… One that concerns aspects about what ‘I’ am… Or, rather, what my ‘self’ is… And while on this hunt for my ‘self,’ I’ve noticed that quite a few scientific publications have also decided to write about this anomaly. Here’s one that I’d like to share with you… One that I read in the New Scientist a couple of months ago about how Buddhism and science are beginning to see eye to eye… Good news, I think!
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What Is The Self
IT’S THERE when we wake up and slips away when we fall asleep, maybe to reappear in our dreams. It’s that feeling we have of being anchored in a body we own and control and perceive the world from within. It’s the feeling of personal identity that stretches across time, from our first memories, via the here and now, to some imagined future. It’s all of these tied into a coherent whole. It’s our sense of self.
Humans have pondered the nature of the self for millennia. Is it real or an illusion? And if real, what is it, and where do we find it?
Different philosophical traditions have reached radically different conclusions. At one extreme is the Buddhist concept of “no self”, in which you are merely a fleeting collection of thoughts and sensations. At the other are dualist ideas, most recently associated with the philosopher Karl Popper and Nobel laureate and neuroscientist John Eccles. They argued that the self exists as a separate “field” which interacts with and controls the brain.
Modern science, if anything, is leaning towards Buddhism. Our sense of self is not an entity in its own right, but emerges from general purpose processes in the brain.
Seth Gillihan and Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have proposed a view of the self that has three strands: the physical self (which arises from our sense of embodiment); the psychological self (which comprises our subjective point-of-view, our autobiographical memories and the ability to differentiate between self and others); and a higher level sense of agency, which attributes the actions of the physical self to the psychological self (Psychological Bulletin, vol 131, p 76).
We are now uncovering some of the brain processes underlying these strands. For instance, Olaf Blanke of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and colleagues have shown that the physical sense of self is centred on the temporo-parietal cortex. It integrates information from your senses to create a sense of embodiment, a feeling of being located in a particular body in a particular place. That feeling can be spectacularly disrupted if the temporo-parietal cortex receives contradictory inputs, causing it to generate out-of-body experiences (New Scientist, 10 October 2009, p 34).
Being in charge
It is proving harder to find the site of our sense of agency – that feeling of being in charge of our actions. In one functional MRI study volunteers with joysticks moved images around on a computer screen. When the volunteer felt he had initiated the action, the brain’s anterior insula was activated but the right inferior parietal cortex lit up when the volunteer attributed the action to the experimenter (Neuroimage, vol 15, p 596).
But other researchers, using different experiments, have identified many more brain regions that seem to be responsible for the sense of agency.
Within the brain, it seems, the self is both everywhere and nowhere. “If you make a list [for what's needed for a sense of self], there is hardly a brain region untouched,” says cognitive philosopher Thomas Metzinger of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Metzinger interprets this as meaning the self is an illusion. We are, he says, fooled by our brains into believing that we are substantial and unchanging. Mental disorders also make it abundantly clear that this entity that we regard as inviolate is not so. For example, those suffering from schizophrenia harbour delusions that experiences and thoughts are being implanted in their brain by someone or something else. “In some sense, it’s a disorder of the self, because these people are doing things, but they are not feeling as if they themselves are doing them,” says Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in the UK. “That’s a disorder of agency.”
Another striking condition is depersonalisation disorder, in which people feel a persistent sense of detachment from their body and thoughts. Even the narrative we have of ourselves as children growing up, becoming adults and growing old, which is carefully constructed from our bank of autobiographical memories, is error prone. Studies have shown that each time we recall an episode from our past, we remember the details differently, thus altering ourselves (Physics of Life Reviews, vol 7, p 88).
So the self, despite its seeming constancy and solidity, is constantly changing. We are not the same person we were a year ago and we will be different tomorrow or a year from now. And the only reason we believe otherwise is because the brain does such a stellar job of pulling the wool over our eyes.
by Anil Ananthaswamy
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To find out where I originally sourced this New Scientist article from, please click here.
And to find out more about the author, Anil Ananthaswamy, please click here.
OR visit the author’s website… Please click here.
The Universe ‘May’ Have A Fractal Structure!
August 24, 2011
In some ways it’s amazing… But in other ways, I wonder if I’m really surprised… ? I’ve been observing fractal patterns now for quite a few years in what many refer to as seemingly unrelated fields of occurrence i.e. hearing them in reverb simulations that I build within Max/MSP, OR while observing the patterns with which the Penicillium fungi grows on the bread that I want to avoid using in the toaster most mornings, through to markets and their ever shifting price-scapes… They’re everywhere. Yes… Everywhere.
They’ve even managed to naturally find their way into the experiential textures of my mind’s dynamic… Textures that the brain seems to weave together through strange attractor like eddies that occur between various nodes and hierarchical synaptic electrical discharges that fire so readily between various clusters within the brain’s overall structure… This in turn allows a type of consciousness to form i.e. myself, to perceive the material ‘aspects’ of the environment that I presently find myself in… ‘Aspects’ that are continually changing/moving/shifting. Most of these transformations are commonly seen as material changes i.e. day to night OR hot water turning into cold water… Changes that are forged from the same principles and materials i.e. atomic debris/fabric of the universe, that ‘I’ find myself a result of.
It’s amazing that ‘my’ five senses can somehow distinguish between these multifarious ‘aspects’ simply by observing the ever changing environmental interplay that unfolds in the world around me – and within me – allowing my body to cross-reference these abstractions (such as smell, sight, touch, taste, sound, etc…) into a functional braid of linear temporal registers that are plied together into a complex feedback loop of conscious awareness that correlates all of them into the fabric of experience. Through the natural evolution of this holographic image of universal dynamics – one that has been naturally selected for in most living organisms here on Earth in some manner or another – it’s pretty obvious that memetic evolution has given rise to – and certainly has benefited from – these unfolding fractal patterns of the mind, brain, body and environmental continuum… And, thus, so have I allowed myself – through much diligent study – to hang a myriad of meanings and socially accepted constructs onto the continuous flow of this biochemically experiential unfolding.
When I sit with this feeling, it seems very natural for everything to be just as it is… For us to be the way we are… Mortal, soft, delicate and changing… Prone to aging and death… Giving way to new progeny in an evolving loop of atomic re-awakening… And environmental readjustment/realignment… Suddenly it becomes okay to accept that one day I will die… And that my patterns of behavior will continue to ripple through the surrounding people I have met and the environment I once lived in, slowly being diluted, intermingling with other people’s activities, every evolving… Ever changing. Perhaps we don’t ever really die… ! Then I see that ‘I’ am not as free as many might imagine we are… Rather we are more willfully able to do whatever it is we choose to with the time we have here, acting within defined parameters of being… Operating to prolong our activities. I find acceptance in these limited modes… And I find true freedom in the limitless possibilities within my imagination. Just as chaos is limitless, and as the brain’s basis for functional ordering uses chaos to operate from… So I find myself not really being surprised that the universe ‘may’ have a fractal structure. When is see my lungs on a X-ray that had recently, there they are again… When I look at my arm closely and see the veins of blood flowing under my skin, fractal shapes come into focus… And I’m just amazed at the beauty of these patterns as they release their energetic uncoiling of potential energy into kinetic displays of wonder and marvel, spreading out over various timings into the delicately interconnected chaos of universal change.
So what I thought was originally surprise… Has in fact turned out to be more of a sense of discovery… A rediscovery of my connectedness… My roots… My interlinked existence to everything – absolutely everything – around me. In many ways it has been an important rediscovery for me because this feeling of interconnectedness seems to have been masked over, obscured from obvious sight, by the daily meanderings of advertising, fictional drivel (mainly in the form of film and pulp fiction), political discussion, religious debate, scientific enquiry and general distraction, all of which seem to come from the supposed “perks” of Western modern day living…
But, thankfully, while immersing myself in this tangled mess of experiential twine – mainly by reading many, many scientific journals/publications over the last fifteen or so years, ones that concern themselves with how universal structure and function came into being (whether on the astrological and/or microscopic levels OR within the dynamics of the mind, brain, body, environmental continuum) – I’ve been unwittingly reconnecting myself with this feeling of interdependence. While closely keeping my eye on how the present theories (yes, theories, in the plural, because there are many of them out there) are continually evolving and changing… I’ve been unintentionally observing another form of natural selection at work… Much like Darwin did. One that is occurring within our minds. And, on the whole, it’s doing exactly what any good evolving form/system does i.e. works through the plethora of memetic constructs that are being formulated from experience by scrubbing the obviously impractical and blatantly cumbersome theories, revealing only the ones that best fit the observations. Then, while subjecting these selected few to yet more stringent tests, each idea/theory is further developed… OR revealed to be a fraud. Eventually one idea/theory in particular is found… One that fits better than all the rest. One that can generate self-similar observed data by repeating the experiments over and over again. This idea/theory then becomes a sort of fact… One that can be expounded further into more developed and concise levels of understanding… Where each idea/theory can interconnect and interrelate to other seemingly unrelated areas of scientific inquiry. Time and again, further cross-referencing and testing ensues, scrutinizing each novel idea/theory/notion… If one doesn’t fit, it is then modified, tweaked, or reconfigured to work into the overall account produced thus far… OR EVEN, if an idea is so obvious, then the other areas might find themselves being revised. This continues ad-infinitum, moving even onwards into finer details… Heading towards the vanishing point of a complexity that knows no bounds… A sort tailor made fitting for a more concise scientific understanding that will never be found.
In fact… So to does the evolution of animal form work in much the same way… As Professor Armand Marie Leroi states, “Species give rise to other species, and as they do so, they change. The changes are minute and subtle, but given enough time, the results could be spectacular. And so they are!” So to do our mind streams change and evolve over time… Allowing us to see more clearly whatever it is we are looking at.
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What Darwin didn’t Know
Documentary which tells the story of evolution theory since Darwin postulated it in 1859 in ‘On the Origin of Species’.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is now scientific orthodoxy, but when it was unveiled it caused a storm of controversy, from fellow scientists as well as religious people. They criticised it for being short on evidence and long on assertion and Darwin, being the honest scientist that he was, agreed with them. He knew that his theory was riddled with ‘difficulties’, but he entrusted future generations to complete his work and prove the essential truth of his vision, which is what scientists have been doing for the past 150 years.
Evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Marie Leroi charts the scientific endeavour that brought about the triumphant renaissance of Darwin’s theory. He argues that, with the new science of evolutionary developmental biology (evo devo), it may be possible to take that theory to a new level – to do more than explain what has evolved in the past, and start to predict what might evolve in the future.
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As time has gone on, I’ve been fortunate enough to rediscover how similar basic patterns permeate almost every single aspect of our lives as human beings… This rediscovery – for me at least – occurred because I had the fortunate experience of studying many dynamical systems for musical analogy… That is, I studied them over and over again, looking at how to translate these natural never-ending patterns into sonic textures for art’s sake. When you see them, though, you begin to spot them everywhere you care to look. It’s almost like it’s so obvious that they’re there, just staring us in the face, that because of it, we just haven’t noticed them… They’ve always been there… In plain sight. So why would we notice them? In some ways it’s just like when the astronauts of Apollo 11 landed to the moon for the first time… When they got there, they couldn’t see any trace of the Earth around them anymore. Their home of a planet was now just a beautiful jewel hanging in the moon’s inky black sky, just out of their reach. Everything that they had taken for granted i.e. an abundance of air, all the trees, plants, life, all the oceans of water, our homes, the people they loved, movies, the abundance of food, animals, clouds, rain, wind, etc… They just weren’t there around them anymore… And it stood out like a soar thumb as to how fortunate they were to live on a planet that had all those things… Things that were so common on Earth. This voyage to the moon profoundly changed the way they i.e Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr and pilot Michael Collins saw the Earth afterwards. In fact it changed ever astronaut who ever went to the moon’s perspective… So that when they returned, they couldn’t help but wonder why people couldn’t see what they now could see so clearly i.e. how precious the Earth is and all the beings that live on it… How connected we all are to one another… To everything around us… How much we need our planet… And how futile all our wars and disagreements are in the greater scheme of everything.
Something similar is going on in science now… Over the last year or so I’ve been coming across many publications wherein scientists are seemingly wanting to let go of some of their earlier preconceptions about how the textbook ideals – one’s which their contemporaries wrote down with absolute certitude for their students to learn from – concerning universal flow and other areas of scientific interest, don’t really quite fit with what these students are actually observing in the “real world…” And along with how they are having to “pull-out-of-the-hat” seemingly bizarre concepts, such as dark matter, in order to balance their predecessors equations… Many are beginning to feel that it’s time to evolve again. Thus it can be noticed that many of the new generation of scientists are looking for novel ideas to re-evaluated what they have learned… And as the models get more and more complex, so to do we see that complexity needs to be better understood… Revealing many types of fractal structures and all sorts of non-linear dynamics residing within the natural flow of universal unfolding.
As I have mentioned before in several blogs contained in this website… Until fractal/chaotic dynamics are properly introduced and included into the equations of physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, etc… There will always be a thin vale of mist that detaches their efforts from discovering the true order of things. For, until this time, discrepancies and vague approximations on how universal flow actually functions will cloud the depth of understanding that lies waiting to be seen beneath this mist.
Saying that… There are those who are already daring to go beyond… As Francesco Sylos Labini clearly demonstrates with his intuitive proposition below… The universe may have a fractal structure…
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Largest Cosmic Structures ‘Too Big’ For Theories
Space is festooned with vast “hyperclusters” of galaxies, a new cosmic map suggests. It could mean that gravity or dark energy – or perhaps something completely unknown – is behaving very strangely indeed.
We know that the universe was smooth just after its birth. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the light emitted 370,000 years after the big bang, reveal only very slight variations in density from place to place. Gravity then took hold and amplified these variations into today’s galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn are arranged into big strings and knots called superclusters, with relatively empty voids in between.
On even larger scales, though, cosmological models say that the expansion of the universe should trump the clumping effect of gravity. That means there should be very little structure on scales larger than a few hundred million light years across.
But the universe, it seems, did not get the memo. Shaun Thomas of University College London (UCL), and colleagues have found aggregations of galaxies stretching for more than 3 billion light years. The hyperclusters are not very sharply defined, with only a couple of per cent variation in density from place to place, but even that density contrast is twice what theory predicts.
“This is a challenging result for the standard cosmological models,” saysFrancesco Sylos Labini of the University of Rome, Italy, who was not involved in the work.
Colour guide
The clumpiness emerges from an enormous catalogue of galaxies called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, compiled with a telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico. The survey plots the 2D positions of galaxies across a quarter of the sky. “Before this survey people were looking at smaller areas,” says Thomas. “As you look at more of the sky, you start to see larger structures.”
A 2D picture of the sky cannot reveal the true large-scale structure in the universe. To get the full picture, Thomas and his colleagues also used the colour of galaxies recorded in the survey.
More distant galaxies look redder than nearby ones because their light has been stretched to longer wavelengths while travelling through an expanding universe. By selecting a variety of bright, old elliptical galaxies whose natural colour is well known, the team calculated approximate distances to more than 700,000 objects. The upshot is a rough 3D map of one quadrant of the universe, showing the hazy outlines of some enormous structures.
Coagulating dark energy
The result hints at some profound new physical phenomenon, perhaps involving dark energy – the mysterious entity that is accelerating the expansion of space. Dark energy is usually assumed to be uniform across the cosmos. If instead it can pool in some areas, then its repulsive force could push away nearby matter, creating these giant patterns.
Alternatively, we may need to extend our understanding of gravity beyond Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “It could be that we need an even more general theory to explain how gravity works on very large scales,” says Thomas.
A more mundane answer might yet emerge. Using colour to find distance is very sensitive to observational error, says David Spergel of Princeton University. Dust and stars in our own galaxy could confuse the dataset, for example. Although the UCL team have run some checks for these sources of error, Thomas admits that the result might turn out to be the effect of foreground stars either masking or mimicking distant galaxies.
Fractal structure?
“It will be essential to confirm this with another technique,” says Spergel. The best solution would be to get detailed spectra of a large number of galaxies. Researchers would be able to work out their distances from Earth much more precisely, since they would know how much their light has been stretched, or red-shifted, by the expansion of space.
Sylos Labini has made such a map using a subset of Sloan data. It reveals clumpiness on unexpectedly large scales – though not as vast as these. He believes that the universe may have a fractal structure, looking similar at all scales.
A comprehensive catalogue of spectra for Sloan galaxies is being assembled in a project called the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Meanwhile, the Dark Energy Survey will use a telescope in Chile to measure the colours of even more galaxies than Sloan, beginning in October. Such maps might bring hyperclusters out of the haze – or consign them to the status of monstrous mirage.
by Stephen Battersby
Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.241301
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For some continued viewing on the subject, please watch the following BBC documentary entitled, “The Secret Life Of Chaos”.
The Secret Life Of Chaos
Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand.
It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here?
In this documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder?
It’s a mindbending, counterintuitive and – for many people – a deeply troubling idea. But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics. Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern.
And the best thing is that one doesn’t need to be a scientist to understand it. The natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity. From trees to clouds to humans – after watching this film you’ll never be able to look at the world in the same way again.
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To find out where I sourced this article from, please click here.
Or to find out where the BBC documentaries originally came from, please click here and/or here.
WORDS… An Exercise In Emptiness.
July 2, 2011
Try this… Repeat a word over and over out loud until you can no longer be sure you are saying it correctly. Notice how, when isolated and repeated, the word seems formless and totally disassociated from any meaning.
With the exception of onomatopeia, the sounds of words do not resemble their meanings, nor do the shapes of letters resemble their sounds. Because they are not representational, words and letters signify by virtue of being distinct from one another. When repeating a letter over and over again, the homogenity of the sound renders the letter impotent. Unable to distinguish itself from one another, the sounds are nothing more than pure audible form, meaningless and redundant rather than specific.
While most words specify, “BLAH” is all things, anything, nothing. Like a Joker in a deck of cards, it takes the place of more “meaningful” words, garnering meaning from its surroundings or its physical appearance. In its conspicuous lack of substance, “BLAH” is the consumate formless word: a blank slate or, like all words and letters, a vessel for meaning without any meaning in and of itself.
I like articles like these… Ones that subtly push clues about just how rare a chance we’ve all been given i.e. to be standing here on Earth, experiencing what we do, today… And every day, for that matter… In this perfectly present moment. In someways, the more I look around me, the more obvious it all becomes… About how we all got here… Chaos is a wonderful thing. In fact, chaos played more of a hand in our fate than many might care to admit. And, in many ways, chaos has now become a friend… An all pervading ally that allows all of us to operate uniquely and interdependently to one another… To function… To live… And to evolve.
But despite its nurturing hand in all events, chaos is a very unstable and unpredictable tangle of cause and effect… One where even if you were to nudge the slightest of atomic arrangements off-course by a couple of nanometers or so, and then separate and let the two ‘slightly’ different systems run onwards for hundreds of thousands of millions of years… And compare the end results… They ‘might’ be so different from one another… Or from what one might expect… That many just wouldn’t believe such a small difference could produced such a pronounced discongruity…
Bearing this in mind… I get a rough feeling of how fortunate we all are to be standing here, with the solid earth underfoot, in some sembling stability of a planetary ecosystem, all residing within our solar system presently. I know… I find myself taking it all for granted frequently… But, would you believe, the stability of the Solar System is a subject of much inquiry in astronomy? Though the planets have been stable historically, and will be in the ‘short-term,’ their weak gravitational effects on one another can add up in unpredictable ways. For this reason (among others) the Solar System is chaotic, and even the most precise long-term models for the orbital motion of the Solar System are not valid over more than a few tens of millions of years.
But then again… This complexity is something that I’ve mentioned several times before here in this blog… Science cannot foretell the future. Rather it can only offer sketches of what could probably happen… Providing, at best, several different arrays of what might possibly come about within a dynamical system, gauged against what is known presently about/within the system.
Still, I feel this article gives one a good feel for the unexpected… And allows one to grasp – if they can imagine the fragility of their world without too much discomfort – just how improbable it is that the Earth resides here, where it does today, in a chaotic solar system (or universe) of chance, that is interconnected to all things through a myriad of strange attractions.
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What Would Happen If Earth and Mars Switched Places?
Last Saturday, at a workshop organized by theFoundation Questions Institute, Nobel laureate physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft gave a few informal remarks on the deep nature of reality. Searching for an analogy to the symmetries of basic physics, he asked the attendees to imagine what would happen to our solar system if you suddenly swapped Earth and Mars. He went on to discuss his ideas for explaining quantum mechanics, but I couldn’t get my mind off his question. What would happen?
Obviously, Martians would be delighted with the new arrangement. A fairly modest increase in Mars’s temperature would melt the polar caps and liberate gases from the soil, flipping the Martian climate into a new, cozier state nearly as warm as Earth. In an article for us in 1999, planetary scientist Chris McKay envisioned terraforming Mars by building factories to pump out greenhouse gases—proving that one man’s poison is another’s elixir—but moving the planet closer to the sun would certainly do the trick, too. Earthlings would get the short end of the deal. Sunlight would be half as intense and the planet would freeze over. On the plus side, we’d instantly be half as many years old.
In grand scheme of things, though, you might think that nothing would change. According to Kepler’s laws, the mass of a planet has almost no effect on its orbit; the mass of the sun is what controls things. Even though Earth is 10 times heavier than Mars, it would still trundle along Mars’s old path. Both Mars and Earth are perpetually falling toward the sun, and all falling bodies fall at the same rate.
But Kepler’s laws don’t account for the subtle gravitational perturbations that planets exert on one another. By rearranging the planets, you perturb these perturbations, and it’s not obvious what would happen. So I posed the question to planetary physicist Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona, who was one of the first scientists to recognize that the planets migrated around early in the history of the solar system. Her initial guess was that Earth’s proximity would thin out the asteroid belt, but that the planets’ orbits would not be destabilized, at least not right away. She offered to run a computer simulation to check.
The results are a bit surprising. The planetary switch-a-roo makes the inner solar system strongly chaotic. Although none of the inner planets gets flung out of the solar system within the first 10 million years, all undergo large variations in their orbital distances. On occasion, Mars dips inward to become the second rock from the sun. To capture these variations, Malhotra found that she had to use a smaller time increment in the simulations than she had predicted, and consequently each computer run took nearly a day to complete.
To speed things up, she tried ignoring the planet Mercury—standard practice in perturbative calculations, on the assumption that Mercury is so piddling that its gravity is immaterial. Not in this case, though. Without Mercury, the other three inner planets went haywire in a few million years. Mars shot off into deep space. The sensitivity to Mercury’s absence is further proof that the altered system would be strongly chaotic.
The graph here shows the actual solar system. For each planet, Malhotra plots the range of orbital distances: perihelion (closest approach to the sun), aphelion (farthest) and semimajor axis (midpoint). As Pierre-Simon Laplace showed in the late 18th century, our solar system is stable. The semimajor axes are constant, and the shapes of orbits vary modestly on a variety of periods, from tens of thousands to millions of years.
This next graph shows the altered system. Notice how wide the range of orbital distances for each planet has become. For Earth, that's because it's now closer to Jupiter; for Mars, because it's the monkey in the middle. Venus changes hardly at all, while Mercury gets batted around like a pingpong ball. Malhotra's simulation also included the outer planets, but I leave them off, because they lumber on as if nothing had changed.
These results support the emerging view, discussed in our pages by Doug Lin several years ago, that the solar system lives on the edge of chaos. It was probably unstable in its formative years. Planets got reshuffled or ejected until the survivors’ orbits were sufficiently well spaced. Any major change would push the system over the edge again. It’s analogous to a coffee cup. If you see a cup that is filled exactly to the rim, you can reasonably conclude that some coffee got spilled over the side, and anything you do to the cup would probably spill some more.
Malhotra has supported this viewpoint in the past, but cautions that the solar system is more stable than its age might imply, so the whole question remains unresolved. “Isn’t it interesting?” she wrote me. “This kind of thing is what attracted me to planetary dynamics.”
by George Musser
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I will be using this example later, among others, to demonstrate that what the Buddhist’s refer to as the “Four Limitless Contemplations” is actually a very obvious and balanced way of viewing our existence… But more on that later.
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